


Stand and Deliver

by rageprufrock



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-03
Updated: 2012-04-03
Packaged: 2017-11-03 00:09:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/374884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An X-Men: First Class genderfuck regency AU; more or less abandoned WIP. Proceed with caution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stand and Deliver

**Author's Note:**

> Sadly, probably never to be finished, but written to please The Hoyden, and rediscovered today while cleaning out my files. I'm still terrrrrrribly fond of these two knuckleheads, it turns out.

Charlotte's only just subdued the blonde jailer Shaw had sent to guarantee her arrival for the wedding when the coach jars to a bone-rattling stop, the horses screaming, and a shot announces a man's voice, calling, "Stand and deliver!"

"Oh, thank God," Charlotte sighs, fairly melting with relief. Ignoring Mrs. Frosts's murderous expression and her muffled shouting — it is relatively difficult to talk around the veil serving currently as a gag, and Charlotte makes a note to write a letter to Mr. Banner on Bond Street, for his lace was second to none — and leaned her head out of the coach door.

"You," Erik tells her, musket still pointed fixedly at the tiger holding the reins to the coach, "are the most excessively troublesome woman I have ever known, Miss Xavier."

Whooping with supremely hoydenish laughter — for besides her excessively troublesome nature, Erik has frequently complained about her supremely hoydenish laughter as well, a guarantee he adores it — Charlotte scrambles out of the coach and lands gracelessly in the dirt of the road, feeling her ankles twinge and her back screaming in pain, the wounds just scabbed over. All of it goes blurry and irrelevant though now, seeing Erik's face and finding that her heart can still spill over with everything she'd felt when he'd left her three years ago, pressing kisses into her fingers and swearing he'd return, that he'd be worthy of her hand. 

"And you are very nearly late!" Charlotte accuses, and runs toward him, toward the beautiful roan horse he's astride, pressing a hand against the creature's flank and looking up toward him. Erik looks tired and older, skin sun browned from the battlefields, and there is a scar on his cheek, pink and new, but he's exactly the same: handsome and solemn, with a hidden streak of wickedness, ferociously certain — dangerous, but not to her. Charlotte is struck with a sudden, inconsolable wave of longing for him, all the loneliness she'd pressed down to the soles of her slippers all these months, and her voice is hoarse as she says, "I knew you would come for me."

At that, Erik's expression goes strange, tense and aching, and before Charlotte can find something to say that might ease it, Erik offers her a hand, pulling her side straddle in front of him on the horse. The move makes her breathless with pain, dizzy from it, leaning weak and boneless into Erik's chest.

"Charlotte?" Erik asks, urgent. 

She fists a hand in his coat, gasping, and trying to breathe through it, feeling every fiber of the linen wrappings pressing into her spine beneath the corset Kurt had forced her into anyway, apparently unconcerned her health or humiliation as he'd sat her room, watching the wet-eyed French lady's maids lacing Charlotte into it.

"I'm fine," she manages, after too long, Erik is sure to be suspicious, although she supposes she can't truly conceal this, anyway. "I'm fine — let's just go, please."

"My lady!" the tiger protests, still staring down the barrel of Erik's gun. "You can't possibly — "

Erik, efficient as ever, sighs in irritation and shoots again, startling the carriage horses and sending the thing into chaos before he murmured, "Let's go, then," and set them off, the carriage, Miss Frost, and the icy memory of Shaw growing smaller and smaller behind them, Erik's heartbeat a steady percussion in Charlotte's ear.

***

For complicated and boring reasons associated with security and avoiding treason, Erik has never fully disclosed his dealings in the military. Charlotte assumes of course it involves espionage and adventures, since they only ride the roan horse for a few more miles before swapping it for a well-sprung carriage in a tiny village near a babbling brook. Dismounting leaves her aching again, ashen-faced, she knows, but she cuts off Erik's poorly concealed concern by saying, "You may fret and shout at me as much as you like later — for now, we should get as far away as possible."

Erik scowls darkly, but doesn't disagree, and pays the coach driver an exorbitant amount of money while saying, "We ride for Gretna Green."

Charlotte laughs at that. "You haven't even proposed yet, you beast."

Enclosed now in the private darkness of the carriage, Erik just pulls off his gloves, stuffing them carelessly into the pockets of his coat, and growls, "Come here."

She goes, unhesitating, but says, "Don't — "

"Your back," Erik guesses, his tone rough with barely-reined fury. "I assume?"

Charlotte is silent for a moment. "It's not bad," she lies. "I'm only being a baby."

"I don't believe you," Erik says to her, harshly and obviously angry, reaching for her gown — a hateful concoction of pale yellow satin, her very ugliest dress and another petty rebellion — and barking, "Let me see."

Supposing Alex Summers' fascinatingly graphic stories about what goes on in the back alleys between gentlemen and not-so-gentlewomen is true, Charlotte assumes that it is inevitable that Erik will see, but it is an irrational spike of fearfulness and burning shame that overrides her logic, here, that has her press her hands against Erik's chest and her mouth against his — to stop him with a kiss.

When she was six and Erik was ten, and Brian Xavier and Jacob Lehnsherr had been too busy discussing something presumably legal and dull in the next room, and Charlotte had acted the part of the rake and stolen Erik's first kiss. He'd shoved her into a pile of cinders and gone shouting for his mother, a less than auspicious start, but he'd been far more amenable by the time she was ten and he was fourteen — already towering — and he'd kissed her to stop her from weeping after they'd buried her father, the duke. When she was seventeen, and Erik a man already, she'd kissed him again, crying again, desperate for him to know her heart before he left her for war.

Now, Erik's kisses are different, less discrete, one melting hotly into another, and Charlotte presses close to him, so she can feel the heat of his body though the bodice of her gown. His hands catch in her hair, palm cradling her neck, cupping her cheek, and the touches are so carefully tender Charlotte can only murmur incoherently into Erik's mouth.

"You scared me to death," Erik confesses, into her mouth, the line of her jaw, whiskers scratching her skin. "When Summers brought Raven's letter, I thought — "

"Stop thinking," Charlotte instructs, trying to catch Erik's mouth again. "Kiss me again."

Erik's laugh is a bit desperate and a lot wild, and Charlotte is so greedy for it, to keep it all her own, she seizes him close, wraps her arms around Erik's shoulders, fists a hand in his hair. She thinks that after all, she is allowed, Erik has always been hers — ever since she marked him with a kiss at six. 

He keeps his hands cupped about her face, his thumb stroking behind her ear, down the line of her neck, and Charlotte sighs into it, surrendering, and Erik unerringly finds her opened mouth with his — teeth and tongue scraping away at her lucid worries. Erik's love has always felt like this: the ferocious sting, the narcotic bliss after. 

"Marry me," Erik begs her, quietly whispered into the bow of her lips, bitten red by him to re-mark his place where he's always belonged. "Vex me for the rest of our lives."

Joy, when Erik is the one seeding it, always feels like the effervescent rush of French champagne: fizzing from her toes to the top of her head, so good her body weakens in its grip, and Charlotte laughs dizzily, pressing her palms into Erik's roughly whiskered cheeks and pressing kisses over his eyes, at his brow, over the stubborn line of his mouth. "Yes — yes, I will. I will hold overflowing salons about chemistry and the sciences and continue to admire disgustingly graphic anatomy texts at breakfast — "

Erik interrupts her here with a kiss, although Charlotte suspects it's more to muffle his own laughter than her words.

" — and we'll have dogs, and a flock of children — "

"A _flock_ ," Erik queries flatly, but his desperation has ebbed away like a wave drawn by the sea, hands sliding too-carefully down her sides to circle her at the hips, fingers knotted into the yellow satin of her full gown. 

" — and you shall never have peace again," Charlotte concludes, promising. 

"Indeed," Erik agrees, softer now, his voice like the look in his eyes. "I couldn't bear it otherwise."

***

They change carriages in lieu of stopping for the night. Erik takes a brief pause from hovering over her protectively to see to some gentlemanly ablutions and sort of payment for their journey, and Charlotte takes the time to happily trade away some of the particularly ugly jewelry Shaw had sent her and that Kurt had forced her to wear for a less-hideous dress and provisions. When Erik returns, boots abrupt on the wooden boards of the shop he'd deposited her, Charlotte feels entirely changed and much better.

"Well?" she asks, twirling. Behind her, she can hear the modiste chuckling, sorting away her shears and threads. Charlotte was lucky, and the dress is very plain anyway: pale blue lawn with a blue sash high beneath her bust, plain sleeves to the elbow, and a gauzy white fichu for modesty. It's a world away from the aggressively ostentatious gown she'd endured earlier, and she feels lighter in it, finds it easier to breathe. 

"That jewelry was worth a fortune. Did you trade it all for the dress?" Erik says out loud, instead of everything that's clear in his gaze. There's always something particularly warming about his expression when he's comforted by the look of her, something calming, that makes Charlotte — who has never succeeded at being sedate at anything — feel docile in his thrall. 

Charlotte presents the picnic basket. "I acquired us food as well," she scolds him. "I'm not an entirely terrible haggler."

"Yes," Erik returns, droll. "A country girl's dress four seasons of out fashion and some ham and bread for Bond Street's finest gold filigree work. You drive a hard bargain."

"It was either that or throw it into the next river we passed," Charlotte mused. "And how wasteful would that be? It's made everyone in this shop very happy, you see."

They are. Mrs. Medworth's eyes had gone enormous like dinner plates when Charlotte had said, "Oh, I haven't any money, but will these do?" and offered up the hair pin, the ear bobs, the ludicrous gold chain Shaw had heaped upon her. Her betrothal ring she'd held back, tucked it into one of her gloves. She won't throw that into a river, but she may hide it among her letters one day, tucked in the end pages of a book of household accounts, when the chill and nausea of her near-marriage of Shaw is almost forgotten to remind herself how close it had been, how lucky she is to have escaped.

"So happy that I assume they will be happy to provide you a good cloak as well?" Erik asks, more to Mrs. Medworth than Charlotte. He arches one brow at the modiste and says, "It's going to be a cool evening."

"Of course, sir," Mrs. Medworth chirrups, and vanishes into the back, presumably to rob another local town girl of her near-finished clothing, the immediate payment of Charlotte's jewels far more captivating than the prospect of small coin from her neighbors.

Erik looks back to Charlotte, here, that secret smile — so small he can only ever be generous with it to her — on his mouth, and he reaches nearby, to a rack of unspooling ribbons. 

"It's not a match for your eyes, you know," he tells her.

Charlotte pinches him viciously, over which Erik makes a noise unbefitting of a man who has been shot at by enemy forces and once lied about having a broken arm. 

"Allow me to revise," Erik corrects himself, " _no color_ produced by mere man could match your eyes."

Sniffing, Charlotte says, "Well played, Mr. Lehnsherr," and then Mrs. Medworth bustles back in with a dark blue cloak, favored with a gorgeous, dusky-pink lining and asks, "Will this be all right for my lady, then?" and before Charlotte can argue that it's entirely too much for the few bobbles that she's offered, Erik intercedes to say, "It will do, and — " he draws on the roll of ribbon here, the intense color of lapis lazuli, scrolling down in curls from being so long wound up " — this as well, too, if you please."

Mrs. Medworth smiles. "It's a good color for her," she comments, and packs it, too.

There are children crawling the village green playing some game Charlotte dearly wishes she could learn, but Erik says, gently and not without apology, "Shaw's men will be coming for us — not to mention Marko's," and Charlotte can only sigh and lean into his side and agree. 

For years, despite Charlotte's early claim on him and very clear and repeated disclosure of her affections, Erik had remained in a constant state of horror about her feelings for him. Charlotte had taken pains to take a survey of the household staff as well as the most inappropriate of the stablehands and footmen and kitchen boys, and they all assured her she was reasonably fair, so she'd supposed that unless Erik was exceedingly picky, then he had no reason not to at least give her an opportunity to win his favor. It hadn't been until she'd been older that her circumstances had crystalized, and Charlotte had spent her ninth birthday sulking in the orangerie because she'd had the grave misfortune of being the daughter of a duke, and therefore somehow unsuitable for the son of a barrister, no matter how cunning his smile or how marvelously he terrified the local bullies.

But that had been her girlhood, and by the time she'd been thirteen, the distances between the life she was expected to lead and the one she wanted seemed to be ever-widening. She was the sole heiress to a vast, entailed estate, and her father had taken pains to settle upon her an enormous portion, otherwise, for her future marital happiness. Raven liked to say darkly that Charlotte is lucky that when Marko had come sniffing into London for a bride, Charlotte had been just eleven, or he would have savaged her and forced her hand into marriage.

Although perhaps perversely, Charlotte has a terrible soft spot for kidnappers. The pair that had snatched her off the side of a village road — foolishly discarding Raven into the millpond, clearly unaware Raven was (a) a fantastic swimmer and (b) the most dangerous when provoked — were after all the reason Erik had come charging to her rescue the _first_ time, shot two men in the knees, and then proceeded to say, " _Charlotte_ ," like he couldn't bear anything otherwise, and kiss her roughly and endlessly on her sixteenth birthday. Certainly, she could have done without the bruises and frankly upsetting threats to her virtue, but she'd concluded that terrible afternoon swaddled in Erik's riding cloak, curled up in his embrace, listening to him capitulate under his own best intentions and love her.

Charlotte had spent the next year in ecstasies, plotting her and Erik's elopement. They would be poor, obviously, but Charlotte was terrible with money, anyway, and they could move into a little cottage. Charlotte would teach — there were ever so many sweet children in the local village — and Erik could make beautiful chairs and tables and a bed for the house and they would overflow it with flowers and shrieking babies. She would rip up all her old dresses for quilts and Raven could stay with them, too, and Charlotte would never be forced to attend another ball or endure another moment thinking Erik would marry that hideous cow, Clarissa Chesterton, the milliner's daughter.

And then he'd confessed: he'd purchased a commission in the army with his inheritance. He had plans to make a name for himself, to come back triumphant and worthy of her. There wouldn't be any little cottage or village, and maybe there wouldn't even be Erik, if he died on the battlefield, and Charlotte had cried for a week after he'd left, thinking she would have rather he _did_ marry Clarissa Chesterton and father hideous boot-faced children with her than die.


End file.
